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Reservation War Formula For Victory Without Victim
By: R.S. Mooshahary

The demand for ST status by the Adivasis, Tai Ahoms, Chutias, Muttocks, Morans, and Koch-Rasbongshis has opened up a can of worms. One can fathom the complexity of the issue from the fact that despite the support of successive state governments and civil society activists it is far from happening. In fact, there is a race to take the credit when it happens and for apportioning the blame if it does not.

The demand has been examined and rejected by the central government more than once. May be the state government will send the proposal again but it will be merely an exercise in passing on the buck to the center, which will further fuel the fire. It has also created a dangerous polarization on ethnic line, which may set the state ablaze on an unprecedented scale. We need to handle this vexed problem with more patience and foresight.

Scheduling a community as tribe is not as simple as categorizing communities as backward. The criteria for tribal identity are specified in clear terms - the community must have primitive lifestyle, contact shyness, geographical isolation, cultural exclusivity and area backwardness. Tribal is a geography, culture and livelihood specific trait and to be scheduled so is not an automatic right. This is the reason why a tribe in one region of Assam is not a tribe in another region within the state or in another state within the northeast.

ST status has important political content by way of reservation in the parliament, assembly and local bodies that empower the tribes to grow according to their own genius. This aspect is crucial because every culture and ethnicity wants to blossom in its own garden without being outgrown by another. This is an uninfringeable essence of tribalhood, which no new arrangement must violate.

No one disputes the backwardness and poverty of the Adivasis in Assam. Indeed the state itself is an example of these deprivations and if they were the sole factors for conferring ST status, the whole state population would become eligible to be tribal. Among the six communities agitating for ST status, the Adivasis may fill the bottom slot in the human development index with the Tai Ahoms topping the pyramid. Putting the communities in one basket may not be equitable because the more advanced groups will disproportionately benefit from it. This happened in the brief period in 1996 when the Koch-Rasbongshis were granted tribe status through an ordinance. It enabled them for a massive quota capture by virtue of their higher human development.

Ethnologically the Adivasis have the least claim to tribal status in Assam. They arrived here much later and that too as indentured laborers and not as group wanderers for food gathering and in search of new homeland, which are tribal characteristics. Their scheduling will also invite trans-provincial implications while that of the five others are of intra-state confines they being indigenous to the state. Therefore, the perception at the national level may vary in scheduling all the six. Ideally, the Adivasis' case should be handled as a separate package.

There will be very little for the Adivasis, given their present economic and educational conditions, in the ST grouping. They will be placed among the unequals in the same battleground where the weaker will lose out to the stronger without hope. At the national level, reservation has not really benefited them much as they have to compete with the advanced tribes like the Meenas, who corner the lion's share of the reserved jobs every year. The Koch-Rasbongshis and the Tai-Ahoms, in their tribal status, will be like the Meenas in Assam legitimately appropriating the reservation pie. It is a fallacious notion that becoming a tribe ensures equity for all.

The Adivasis are the aboriginals of India but they are not the autochthones of Assam. The tribes of Assam are also Adivasis because they were the earliest settlers here. In a way, they have commonalities of exclusivity. They both are victims of exploitation and social inequity; but dissimilarities are larger. The Adivasis are a legion having vast territorial hold in central India, with considerable influence in Indian polity; they are migratory and their flow along the continuum has given them greater numerical strength than the tribes put together in the state. Assam tribes have no such trait or clout.

Tribes in Assam do not pose threat to each other because they are small and almost equally poised in their respective domains. There is a lurking fear that conferring ST status to the Adivasis may invite large-scale migration from central India thereby threatening the delicate tribe equilibrium in the state. They are also apprehensive, buttressed by empirical data that forward groups like the Tai-Ahoms and Koch-Rasbongshis may overwhelm them by their intellectual superiority after their inclusion in the ST list.

The parameters of eligibility for recognition as ST are sacrosanct but the government may shortcut them if dictated by political expediency and compulsions. And if that happens without protecting the interests of existing tribes who have woven their nests of hopes and aspirations under the protective umbrella of reservation, they will go wild like the threatened wasps furiously stinging the state into a painful ethnic unrest.

We should not embark on a policy that will hurt one group while trying to heal the pain of another. In dousing one fire, the sparks should not cause conflagration not only in Assam but also in far away states like Rajasthan. Nor should it develop in to a situation in which the deprived and the excluded groups fight another war of attrition against each other like the one that happened in mid nineties between the Santhals and Bodos, which left more death and devastation than the insurgency in the last twenty years.

Reservation is already pegged at 49.5% and it cannot go up further. Within that limitation, the equitable and practical solution lies in creating group specific reservation out of the OBC quota. It will then ensure that the share of a community is not appropriated by another. More importantly, it will discourage migration and high growth rate, avoid group conflict and inspire greater sense of belonging.

This arrangement already exists as Assam has two types of tribal identities - the hill and the plain tribes with separate and exclusive quotas and it is working smoothly. A new ST group - The Assam Special Tribes - can likewise be scheduled with separate and exclusive quotas for each of the six communities out of the OBC quota. They can be identified as AST (Moran), AST (Chutia), AST (Muttock) etc. The package should include area specific political rights by constituting autonomous councils based on ground factors of which Assam has already half a dozen. That, of course, may be redundant for the Tai-Ahoms and Koch-Rasbongshis as they are the leading communities in ruling Assam since the last seven hundred years. This model may work well for other states as well.

Any solution to this problem will require constitutional amendment and new legislation. So let it not be an amendment to foment ethnic conflict and hatred but to bring durable peace. There may be other options but in this one, every group will win and none will lose.

The write, a former Director General of Police in Kerala and Director General of Border Security Force and the National Security Guard, is currently the State Chief Information Commissioner, Assam